


gray areas and expectations

by sugodemic



Series: BIB2016 [1]
Category: K-pop, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Bathing/Washing, Blood and Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Open to Interpretation, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 16:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7276018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugodemic/pseuds/sugodemic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>yoongi always thinks, and always has thought, seokjin should be treated like a prince too. if not by everyone, then at least by him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gray areas and expectations

**Author's Note:**

> a fill of two prompts:
> 
> \- june prompt: person a comes home all battered and bruised, which makes person b extremely worried. person a refuses to talk about it but person b is determined to find the person who did it. (for btswriters)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> \- bathing/washing (for BIB2016)
> 
> title from talk me down by troye sivan
> 
> relationship is up to interpretation

“It’s okay,” Seokjin says, warns, chants, wishes under his breath to Yoongi when he opens the door to let him in. “It’s okay, sir,” he says again when Yoongi sees him, dimly lit by moonlight from the open window behind him. He’s dripping blood onto the rug outside the room.

Yoongi hates how his first instinct when his knees go weak is to reach for Seokjin’s arm to keep himself from falling. He grips the edge of the door instead. He hates the expectation that a firm arm will snake around his waist and hold him up and take care of everything so he doesn’t have to. He hates the sleepy guard turning the corner with an oil lamp in hand, always lingering, making his rounds. What he hates the most is how Seokjin still won’t come in without permission and still won’t call him by his name.

Yoongi doesn’t quite know where to touch him so he won’t mess him up. He never knows, can never find the right spots, never seems to find something he’s comfortable with. This time he guides him inside with a cold hand firm on the back of his neck, fingers gathering in his sweaty hair while he closes the door. The light from the fireplace outlines his shoulders, showcases the way he’s shaking, how spread thin he looks.

“It’s okay,” Seokjin says, but his voice slips away and he drags out the last syllable so desperately that it’s like he’s trying to make the reassurance last longer. It does nothing to comfort him when there’s already blood seeping into the skinned animals on the floor, the ones Yoongi’s father caught and thought would be an exception to his strong preferences (as though Yoongi couldn’t _help_ but appreciate this). But at least he’d been smart enough to teach him first-aid in case of hunting accidents.

This is no hunting accident.

Yoongi lights the oil lamps in silence, and when he replaces his hand on the back of Seokjin’s neck, he leans back into his touch. “It’s not as much blood as it seems,” Seokjin says.

“Just enough to soak your pants through and ruin a pelt,” Yoongi says, turning Seokjin towards him. “Just enough for the maids to scrub in the morning.” There’s a venom to his voice, a tight knot of something he can’t swallow, a cloud fogging his vision and eroding him from the inside out.

“It’s okay,” Seokjin whispers. The syllables disentangle now, two words fuzzing into nothing but a constant noise muttered like a spell. He leans harder into Yoongi’s touch and then it’s too hard and he’s falling, falling back.

“Stop telling _me_ it’s okay,” Yoongi says through gritted teeth. He sounds small and he is small with Seokjin’s weight crashing into his arms and his chest. He sounds like he’s going to cry. He sounds like something is choking him and it’s not okay, god knows it’s not okay to not be able to breathe.

“Not everything is for you,” Seokjin says after Yoongi lowers him to the ground and crouches in front of him.

He folds in and buries his face into Yoongi’s legs, bare just below his nightgown, and curls his fingers into Yoongi’s left hipbone, into Yoongi’s right shoulder, into the soft places and the hard places and the inbetweens. He keeps swallowing, keeps swallowing, keeps on swallowing and forcing the pain onto mute, muffling it and wrestling with it and trying to keep a hand over its mouth while it bites down on the skin on his palm in retaliation.

Seokjin loses the battle to hot tears that paint Yoongi’s calves and filter through the dark hair. Splintered gasps fill up his lungs. “Oh my god.” His voice breaks up into sections and he keeps repeating himself until the words lose their form, lose their meaning, lose their connotation, their end and their beginning, and once they fall apart on his bloody lips, he chooses new ones that are still intact. “It hurts.”

“Where does it hurt?”

“My leg. Everywhere. I can’t get up.”

Yoongi tries to stand up and he tries to lift Seokjin with him and he tries and he’s trying but Seokjin refuses to move. “We’ll go to my bed and then— and then we figure it out from there.”

“No,” Seokjin says into Yoongi’s skin, hand falling limp from his shoulder.

“Stand up.”

“You don’t have to do anything. I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Stand up, Seokjin. That’s an order.”

It’s not. It’s an order because he’s begging. He’s begging with Seokjin’s tears dripping off his knees, the smell of Seokjin’s blood clogged in his throat that’s making him gag, unexpected strength in his arms, and Seokjin draped over his lap. The pieces are everywhere, the evidence damning, and he has no choice to comply.

Yoongi warms water over the fire and makes quick work of taking off Seokjin’s clothes. His arms are littered with bruises and welts, his back with small cuts, his outer thigh with a gash, and Yoongi’s heart races and his joints tighten. “Who did this to you?”

“It’s called sparring.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Seokjin looks in the other direction. “Just like you’re still in training to take the throne, I’m training to serve you. You have to trust that I don’t receive empty discipline.”

“I’ll rip out their fucking jugular.” 

Seokjin goes quiet until Yoongi’s finished swiping the damp cloth over his lips. “My teachers think I’m arrogant,” he says, and Yoongi has to strain to hear him. “Because I work hard and I try hard and I know more than they think I deserve to know. Because I was doing okay and since we don’t do things the same way, they don’t think I deserve to be okay. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Yes, there is.”

“You were born with more options than I’ll ever have. You shouldn’t try to understand, because you can’t.”

Yoongi looks away, wets his hands, runs his fingers through Seokjin’s hair. It makes him uncomfortable when Seokjin’s right, when Seokjin’s so right and Yoongi’s so clueless and he doesn’t know what to say anymore. It hurts his pride, but it only hurts his pride because he’s not good enough. So he eases the tangles out of Seokjin’s hair and tries to be gentle while he can, while nothing hurts as bad.

“If I asked more questions, if I made a few more careless mistakes, if I stayed in my place, if I wasn’t honest about what I’m capable of, I think they’d leave me alone. But I can’t do that for their pride. Imagine how many opportunities I’d miss.” His tone is loose and rushed and Yoongi knows that he’s trying so hard to distract himself. He flinches when Yoongi runs the damp cloth over his arms, over the bruises like storm clouds on his skin, and curls his toes like he’s trying to claw into the floor and drop down into it. He starts breathing harder, breathing so hard that he’s stacking on top of himself, and manages a strained whimper.

“Almost done,” Yoongi says. He’s not almost done. He’s nowhere near done, it just hurts that Seokjin is hurting.

He holds onto Yoongi’s shoulder when he washes his back, gripping hard enough to bruise, and he almost passes out twice. “It’s ironic. The problem is everyone thinks you’re giving me special treatment. And they’re right.”

Yoongi doesn’t say anything.

Seokjin’s body tightens when Yoongi dabs his leg wound. “It’s not that deep. It’s just a cut.”

“Still needs to be cleaned. Either by me or someone who knows how.”

“I’m done for tonight.” His voice quivers and raises in pitch and he grabs Yoongi’s arm to stop him from doing any more.

“If it gets infected—”

“I said I’m _done_.”

Yoongi stops.

He knows Seokjin. He shouldn’t be pushed. He doesn’t have untapped energy reserves and limits that can be surpassed to miraculously jumpstart growth. He can’t go past exhaustion and be stronger for it the next day.

Yoongi lowers his voice. “Okay. Hold on. Let me just bandage up your leg.”

Seokjin lies down and curls into himself once it’s done, makes himself small and two-dimensional and tucked out of the way. He squeezes his eyes shut and tenses up, like he’s trying to force himself to sleep or stay still and stop thinking.

“Are you comfortable?”

Seokjin shakes his head into Yoongi’s pillow. “I shouldn’t have come here, Yoongi. I shouldn’t come to you for help instead of the other way around.”

Yoongi looks around like there’s someone else besides the two of them in the room. Someone, anyone, who can take over because he’s feeling helpless and useless and not enough and he’s only getting in the way. He wishes there were a better version of himself around, one that could do more than lay beside Seokjin and watch him and let the gap between them make everything cold when it could be warm. He wishes there were a better version of himself who could touch Seokjin the right way, and wasn’t so scared of messing up that he did nothing.

“I’m scared,” Seokjin says. “And I made everything worse and I’m tired of hurting.”

Yoongi knows that sometimes Seokjin can’t keep going anymore. Seokjin has bad days too. And even though he paces himself when they encroach upon his vision, some days are so punishing in their uncertainty that it’s hard to keep trying.

Sometimes there’s no helping it, and all Yoongi can do is try enough for the both of them. Pull the linens up and over their heads and knead the tension out of the back of Seokjin’s neck so that it’s not stiff when he wakes up. When he wakes up to panicked guards thinking it’s the blood of their prince, accusations and made-up stories, too many questions, and too many answers assumed. Opinions they didn’t ask for about how they’re almost _too_ close, and if Yoongi was as interested in women as he was his damn servant, he’d be better socially, and Seokjin is disrespectful for treating Yoongi as both his friend and the person he was born to protect instead of just the latter.

Seokjin’s breathing too fast. “It’s going to get worse when everyone finds out.” He wraps his arms around himself like he’s trying to keep the gasps from racing out of his control. Like he’s trying to keep in something in that’s spilling from his pores and the cracks in his skin and neither of them have the surface area to do the job.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I should know my place by now, Yoongi.”

“No. You know your place. Your place is with people who are good to you.”

Yoongi means every word of that. He’s always felt that Seokjin deserved to be treated like a prince too. That’s why Yoongi serves Seokjin just as much as Seokjin serves him—on the good days and the bad days.

**Author's Note:**

> hurt/comfort where seokjin is the one hurting honestly isn't something i see much, so i decided to make some. it can be hard to characterize him at his worst because that's not what comes to mind when you think of seokjin. it's easy to put him in the role of The Comforter so i decided to challenge myself and really think about this and i like the result.
> 
> next i'll be back either with a jihope oneshot or a fic for the jin exchange! stay tuned
> 
> tumblr: [bottomnamjoon](http://bottomnamjoon.tumblr.com)
> 
> [buy me a coffee?](http://ko-fi.com/A7043F5)


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